Our Social Compact with America–FAILED

Every American citizen lives with the implicit understanding that there exists a promise from our elected Government to abide by the ideals and covenants memorialized in our founding documents and refined by the statutes and rules under which we all live and executed by duly elected officials who swear to protect the Constitution and laws. To enjoy the benefits of government, we voluntarily give up certain liberties and freedoms trusting that our government will protect us from harm as a reward for abiding by this arrangement. This is called the Social Compact/Contract defined as:

“agreement, entered into by individuals, that results in the formation of the state or of organized society, the prime motive being the desire for protection, which entails the surrender of some or all personal liberties”

This understanding between the parties to this agreement is a bedrock, foundational minimum expectation we all have from government. It is a debt owed to citizens by every level of Government—that is why we have the term public servants. In return for our willingness to eschew violence, to willingly participate in the American way of life and to support government with our taxes, we expect the government to uphold its end of the bargain and provide the protections and rights it has promised us. American government was set up to have checks and balances that would assure that no one branch of government violated this social compact. The executive, legislative and judicial arms of the government are designed to prevent abuses from within government against citizens or groups of citizens.

But what happens when those safeguards fail? What happens when the individuals that constitute these arms of government fail to discharge their responsibilities to society? When checks and balances fail within government and government becomes incapable of fulfilling its promise to citizens to whom does it fall to correct that intolerable absence of justice and egregious episodes of injustice?

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and courts not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who would pervert the Constitution. — Abraham Lincoln.

But is it even possible for We the people to effect any meaningful redress when our compact with the government has been violated? Is it possible for the citizenry, not big business, not vested political interests, not lobbyists, not big banks, not lifetime politicians to bring and promote integrity, honesty and justice for ourselves? Is it reasonable for advocates to expect that political activity, legislation, activism and advocacy will have any impact on the vested interests in government and the abject corruption they spawn?

As an advocate for those trapped in corrupt and abusive guardianships throughout the country, my experience after years of attempts to reach out to every conceivable level of government, is that at this moment in time change is essentially impossible.

Whether it is clearly capacitated individuals begging to get their rights back through the court process and failing every time, whether it has to do with the rigged game of incapacity determination examinations, whether it has to do with probate judge’s opinions that are so transparently outrageous and corrupt, whether it has to do with predatory lawyers who work both sides of the fence to make profit no matter what the outcome in guardianship cases, whether it is blatantly criminal acts by what can only be described as sociopathic and evil guardians, whether it is politicians who intentionally turn a blind eye to the suffering of their constituents, whether it is the Bar who happily desecrates the rights of innocent individuals for profit for their members, whether it is commissions agencies committees or study groups that are all rigged to avoid solving problems and maintain the status quo so long as it is profitable, justice and honest government cannot be achieved with business as usual.

Guardianship is a microcosm of trends in our economy and in our country. There are countless schemes and scams that abound here designed to disadvantage innocent individuals who fall prey to dishonesty corruption and crime sanctioned by government and in particular by the judiciary, the only independent branch of government.

Focusing on the judiciary even a superficial perusal of the system would convince anyone that it is essentially impossible to even imagine transparency and honesty in our courts. The checks and balances intended to rein in the judiciary simply do not function as intended. The artifices established to monitor and regulate judges and lawyers have been perverted into a system that prevents any real scrutiny of their activities. The Bar associations throughout the country and particularly in Florida have not do not and will not protect the rights of citizens who have legitimate complaints about the corruption so prevalent within certain sections of the attorney community. A much larger embarrassment is the Judicial Qualifications Commission which apparently believes that once elected, a judge always does only what’s perfectly correct and as such should never even face investigation unless his crime has something to do with alcoholism, perversion or taking money from the wrong person. Both these institutions are embarrassments and need to be instantly reformed. But who will effect that? What incentive does the legal community have to change when they are in absolute total control and profit enormously from their unlimited power? Even if there were a reformer within the judicial and lawyer community the likelihood of his facing fatal retaliation would almost certainly guarantee his efforts to fail.

While the number of victims of abusive guardianship in the United States does amount to more than several million individuals both directly and indirectly impacted, there is no political action committee, no well-known celebrity spokesperson, no tearjerker images on television commercials, no social movement, and there certainly is no significant money available to reliably expose the corruption for what it is and certainly not enough to result in significant action by any federal state or local government. While there are voices throughout the country on social media, while there is a flood of new guardianships being created every single day, while countless individuals suffer horrific indignities and abuse and exploitation, there has not arisen the clamor and outcry that our society appears to require before it becomes outraged itself.

It seems not to matter that there are laws already on the books to prevent Ward abuse. Those laws across the country are simply ignored by a judiciary that interprets the law as it chooses and enforces only the laws that benefit itself. And the benefits are gargantuan. The guardianship racket throughout America is in possession of trillions of dollars of assets they have seized from innocent individuals by virtue of their alleged capacity. If it takes the abject physical emotional and psychological abuse of wards trapped under their control to access that money, so be it. If it takes ruining families, so be it. If it takes staged litigation, lying to everyone including the judge, colluding with other lawyers, defending predatory guardians, breaking the law, violating every ethical principle, embezzling from ward’s estates, overbilling, double billing, altering records, stealing from Social Security benefits, stealing from Veterans Association benefits, forging documents so be it because it’s all about the money.

When these racketeers seize and consume the lifetime savings of an innocent Ward and use it primarily for their own benefit while overseeing the forced isolation, abuse, exploitation and over medication and ultimate death of an innocent individual in our society as well as the destruction of their family, it is fair to say that the judiciary has become complicit in the rape and murder of innocent Americans and that the system designed to prevent these crimes has itself become criminal and that criminality is an egregious violation of the elemental American social contract.

Because we are law-abiding even though the government is not, it is unlikely that victims of this racket will resort to violent civil disobedience. Since the victims of this racket are emotionally physically and financially destroyed, it is unlikely that they will band together into a national social movement if for no other reason than they are completely exhausted and terrified at what has happened to them and fear even more retribution from an unrestrained, vindictive and corrupt judiciary. Because we still hold out some faint hope that government will be responsive to our countless requests for intervention, justice and honesty, we continue to engage in endlessly futile efforts that ask a corrupt system to reform itself. Because we still believe our civics lessons that teach us about the integrity of government, we think that if we complain enough, write enough letters, posts, tweets, e-mails and texts that somehow they will no longer be simply discarded without having been read and that they will spark the fire of reform.

The obvious question then becomes; what we can do?

At the moment, the answer is to educate, advocate and legislate wherever we can. We need to expose this racket for what it is- a corrupt wealth extraction scheme run under the guise of helping vulnerable people.

We will impatiently wait for a champion for our cause to arise—perhaps the rarest of creatures, an honest politician or Judge—who will place justice above cronyism and demand that there be no more abuse in court ordered guardianships. That day cannot come too soon.